There is a device that assesses the overall driving skills of a driver and performs driving support on the basis of a result of the assessment (see Japanese Patent No. 5294193). This device detects a driving status by using sensor data, such as a yaw rate, an acceleration, a steering angle, and an accelerator position, generates driving pattern information through statistical computation based on time-series data about the driving status, locating a driving pattern included in the driving pattern information in an assessment space for assessing similarity among driving patterns, assesses the level of driving skills in accordance with a distribution state of the driving pattern in the assessment space, and performs driving support on the basis of the assessment result of the driving skills.
Also, the following system is available as a technique for assessing the driving characteristics and the level of skills of a driver (see Japanese Patent No. 4865711). This system assesses the proficiency and driving characteristics of a driver by generating an event sequence (for example, a sequence representing a change in state, for example, a maximum value of lateral acceleration is generated before braking starts) from a data stream (for example, lateral acceleration, longitudinal acceleration, deceleration, and turning angle) representing a vehicle operation performed by the driver, and comparing the generated sequence with a sequence that is generated in advance and represents an unskilled driver, greatly-skilled driver, safety running operation, dangerous running operation, and so forth.
However, in the above-described device or system according to the related art, the types of data to be collected to determine the driving characteristics of a driver are wide-ranging and the amount of data to be processed is enormous. This results in a heavy computation load for data processing, longer processing time, and higher computation performance of a processing device. Accordingly, the cost of a device and system for supporting driving may increase.
Under the above-described circumstances, there is a demand for a driving support device that determines the driving characteristics and driving skills of a driver in a short time by easily collecting necessary data and that performs driving support in accordance with the determined driving characteristics and driving skills.